English Dub Review: Tokyo Ghoul: Re “turn: In The End”

The lies we live are painted onto the canvas of our truth.

Overview (Spoilers)

Sasaki finds himself lying on a checkerboard floor. This is his mind space, the place where he keeps that which he denies. When he was Kaneki, this place was reserved for Rize: the thoughtform he imbued with his instincts and powers as a Ghoul. Here, he struggled with her for dominance. It was only when Kaneki accepted Rize that he was able to unleash his full power, escape Yamori, and gain the power of his centipede kakuja. It also warped his thoughts, aligning his processes with those of Rize and Yamori.

Now, Sasaki looks up to find, sitting in the chair of torment, Kaneki, who asks only that Sasaki says his name. But, by doing so, he would give power to the part of himself he had locked away. The splintered, violent man he once was. The Sasaki he became could vanish. Of course, that doesn’t really matter now. Now, Takizawa kicks him to the curb. While his squadmates are busy with Nutcracker and Big Madame, he finds himself completely alone.

Saiko, Shirazu, and Hayashimura do battle with a despondent Nutcracker. Though upset about losing her payday, but that doesn’t make her any less of a threat. Her detachable kagune blades booby-trap the area, making it dangerous to get near the walls and ceiling. Since she also has a composite kagune, one that has both a blade-tipped tail and shielding wings, it’s a bit difficult to get a good shot off with Shirasu’s missile kagune.  The wings also afford her extra maneuverability, and she only barely misses a super-powered, high-heeled stomp on Shirazu’s manly bits.

Mutsuki tries his hardest to rescue Urie from Big Madame. He’s half in her mouth, and behind a pair of bodyguards. Urie frees himself, unleashing his new Frame 4 kagune. His ghoul instincts quickly overwhelm his mind, and he loses his “self” to an obsession with… himself. Even though he quickly mops the floor with the bodyguards and Madame’s kagune, he’s no match for her sheer brute strength. Defeated, he starts whining about how fate is always keeping him down, and he’s so worthless. Unable to pull himself out of his own self-pity, he lashes out at Mutsuki…

Who simply takes it. His kagune finally manifest, encapsulating Urie in four tails that resemble the asian phoenix, Ho-ou. Urie finally comes to his senses as Mutsuki consoles him, then smells something he wasn’t expecting. Mutsuki is a… No time for that, now. Juuzou and his team erupt on to the scene, ready to finish off Big Madame. Mercilessly, the squad hacks at the giant ghoul as she begs the person she raised not to kill her. They simply shield Juuzo’s ears and cut her down. Still, he gets the closure he needs.

In the meantime, Shirazu figure’s out the key to defeating Nutcracker. He convinces Saiko to get involved, tugging on her heartstrings and her love for Sasaki. He then tricks Nutcracker into a bad position and launches her up towards the ceiling. You see, her kagune aren’t connected to her will. They merely react to vibrations in their surrounding area. So, they aren’t able to differentiate between friend or foe. His trick impales her with her own kagune, stunning her long enough for Saiko to unleash her hidden potential. The room is no more. In her final moments, Nutcracker remembers her childhood in the gutters, and her desperate wish to be pretty. Hearing this wish cuts Shirazu to the core. It made her sound so… human.

As Takizawa takes his time killing the investigator, a strange agent slips into the control room and transmits Sasaki’s screams of pain all over the building. This draws the attention of a Ghoul that Takizawa refers to as Little Hina. Her kagune is familiar, too. Could it be? Hinami Fueguchi? Little parrot? She’s gotten a bit older and a LOT scarier. She tackles Takizawa, beating him down and forcing him to conjure his kakuja. In this form, she can barely keep up with him.

Sasaki reawakens, finally willing to disappear if he can have the power to save those that matter to him. He sits and admits everything about Kanaki that scared him. As he does, Kanaki changes in front of him. He’s no longer the bedraggled, tormented man we’ve known. He’s a child: the pure, true self. He doesn’t want to take control. He simply wants to continue existing. He’s scared, too. With his full power unleashed, he makes one final attack against Takizawa…

Our Take

Oh, wow. This episode is what I’ve been wanting for a while now. Action, drama, psychology, hidden pasts, character growth… just… YES! So, before I get into everything I liked about the episode, I’ll tell you there were plenty of animation errors here. Little places where the characters aren’t drawn the same from one frame to the next, and where they go off-model. This doesn’t bother me as much because the only way I caught it was because I had to watch twice to get thumbnails. Things move fast in this episode, and a lot happens, so its easy to miss these errors. So: bad that they exist, good that they’re hard to notice.

This episode gives us massive growth for the whole team. It also reveals what I learned a while back about Mutsuki, but is good and subtle about it. Urie gets good and close to Mutsuki in this episode, and the smell he gets off his teammate makes him realize something. He just doesn’t say what. While the audience is left in the dark about the smell itself, I think we all know by his surprise that Mutsuki is physically female. It isn’t the smell of his hair that tips Urie off. In the manga, he realizes the smell of blood coming from Mutsuki wasn’t from kills or wounds. They don’t spell it out for you here, which I appreciate. When it comes to smart writing, it’s often about what isn’t said. How did I figure it out? Female voice actress. I know. It’s cheating.

Urie’s growth is only beginning. He went off the deep end, and sees where that has taken him. Hopefully, this snaps him out of his self-pity and pushes him towards a place where he is capable of being a part of a team. He focused on getting his, and in doing so, held the team back and put junior members in danger. This, in turn, keeps him from getting his. It’s a vicious cycle. For a while, I thought he felt more like an antagonist among the heroes than a protagonist with issues. He may finally be on the right track, but I doubt it will be an overnight change. This is going to be a journey for him.

The star performance here, however, is with Sasaki/Kaneki. I love stories with deep psychological meaning, and this one is truly interesting. This composite mind compartmentalizes his old self away as Kaneki. On the surface, this seems like a good idea. Kaneki’s violent mind held elements of the two people who gave him the most trauma in his life. By sealing away that part of him, he not only holds back that trauma, but prevents the surfacing of those violent tendencies. In a way, this leads us to think that Kaneki is the Jungian Shadow, the part of Sasaki that he denies. By fighting against Kaneki this whole time, he only empowers the thoughtform. This makes the void within him stronger, and threatens to allow the Shadow an opportunity to overwhelm him.

By coming to accept the Shadow, Sasaki is now able to lay claim to his soul. However, the soul manifests here as the Child Archetype. In Jung, the Child represents the developing personality and raw potential. Sasaki keeps dominance of the mind, revealing that he is, in fact, the conscious self. He claims what in intrinsically “him” without bringing in those elements that are not. He is now pure.

This episode’s pacing was intense for containing such heady subject matter. The first half of it had enough going on that it felt like an episode to itself. I was glued to the screen the whole time. We’ve finally gotten away from the mook battles, and are in the headliner bouts. The animation moves well, minus the errors, but what takes the cake is the cinematography and how it keys with the music. Dramatic and dynamic. I loved how they brought back the opening credits music from the first season as Sasaki accepts Kaneki. “Unravel” has long symbolized Kaneki coming to accept Rize, and dealing with his Ghoul side. Now, as his mind comes unraveled again, the song echoes the beginning of the series. We go back to the true person behind Sasaki, just as we go back to the first song, and we come back with a new perspective. The final shot of the episode is of Sasaki in the style of the first opening credits as well, further symbolizing his return to purity.